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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (105438)	3/4/2009 8:33:44 AM
From: ChinuSFO	Respond to of 541957

Basic lessons about stimulus and a mouse David Wells Cincinnati.Com Last Updated: 8:21 am \| Saturday, February 28, 2009 Click on "Letters" under the Opinion tab on Cincinnati.Com and you can pull up hundreds of opinions about the $800 billion federal economic stimulus bill. Just about every one of them finds something not to like in the bill - from the salt marsh mouse of San Francisco to the streetcar project of Cincinnati. Unfortunately, many of the letters seem to misunderstand the concept behind such a bill. The basic idea is that the government is pumping money into all of these proposals to stir economic activity. That includes obvious job creation ideas such as building bridges and fixing roads. But it also includes social welfare expenditures like extending unemployment and food stamp programs - which, judging from some of our letter writers, is a little harder to understand. What jobs are provided by "welfare?" Think of it like this: Extending unemployment and food stamps, helping to underwrite Ohio's ever-growing Medicaid costs, or even bailing out the guy down the street who foolishly got into a mortgage he couldn't afford keeps the beneficiaries of that "welfare" contributing to the economy. Those unemployment checks and food stamps get spent into the economy. Covering Ohio's deficit will help prevent cuts in jobs and programs. Keeping your neighbor's house out of foreclosure may keep the value of your house from declining. These things may not prompt growth, but it's good enough if they help prevent further slippage. In the catchphrase Newsweek's Daniel Gross has popularized, "flat is the new up." In this economy, it may be the best we can do in the short term. There are other things in the stimulus bill aimed at the longer term - including projects like the streetcars and that little mouse. The mouse's tale is attributed to Michael Steel, an aide to our own Rep. John Boehner, R-West Chester, the House Republican leader. Steel wrote a memo Feb. 11 about things in the bill the Republicans could criticize, including $37.5 million for wetland restoration around San Francisco Bay. The area is home to both the mouse, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Within a day, that led to a Washington Times headline: "Pelosi's mouse slated for $30M slice of cheese." Forget that the wetland restoration is part of a major "shovel-ready" coastal restoration project on the drawing board of the Army Corps of Engineers and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. If the project makes it through the selection process, the benefit to the mouse will be a coincidental. The real beneficiaries will be all the people put to work restoring 26,000 acres of coastline, and the places they spend their paychecks. The mouse, never mentioned by name in the stimulus bill, is really a red herring. news.cincinnati.com